


All The World's Tomorrows

by felsider (VSSAKJ)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Poetry, Reincarnation, Soulmates, Tragedy, prose, prose poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 10:49:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 3,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19105591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VSSAKJ/pseuds/felsider
Summary: To the sleeping darkness, he whispers, “Is this what you wanted?”, meaning a hundred different things.To the sleeping darkness, he whispers, “Is this what you wanted?”, knowing the answer.





	1. at the start of something was the end

**Author's Note:**

> A pair of original characters with thousands of lifetimes between them. Their names are Daimd and Quinn: we call them Damned and Delinquent.
> 
> Quinn's the angry one.

“Quinn. I should have apologised. I should have remembered. I should have said to you, a hundred lifetimes ago, I was wrong about everything. You were right, Quinn. I remember. I need you to forgive me. I need you to forgive _you_. Quinn, before you die, please.”

Quinn tilts his head to one side, eyes glazed but for a single, sharp, shiny glint like a grain of sand. “You’re lying.” He hisses. He coughs; the sound’s full of liquid. When he looks, his eyes are blacker than midnight a thousand miles from the city lights. “You just want out. I’ll never forgive you. I’ll _never_ forgive you.

“He would never have let me die.”


	2. you’re selfish and a coward, yet you can hold my hand even tighter

_You’re the only one who stops me. I hate it. You think you have the right? Don’t be an idiot, Daimd._

I watch the way you stare into the fire, miles away from my touch on your knee, and never question where my lines are drawn. The only thing I will ever stop you doing is taking your own life. I have loved you for many years, and I love you as you are. I love your teeth in my neck, your nails in my spine, your screams in my ear, your frustration in my gut, your fury in my heart, your desperation in my throat, and your knuckles in my cheekbones. I love your unspoken secrets and your whispered lies, your inaccuracies and your solecisms, and how despite all the cracks running through your life, you are the most I have ever known.

You doubt me. You doubt yourself. But I know for us both, and know your depth, your breadth, and your boundless scope. I will promise, again and again, that you are all that makes me alive, and one day you will believe me.


	3. things you said when you were scared

_You told me to leave._

“Get away from me! Don’t touch me! Filthy fucking _animal_.” Daliquinn snarled into the night, sword drawn and flashing, not as sharp as the glint in his eyes.

Daimd ranged just beyond the reach of the blade, hands raised in gentle submission. He spoke, soft as always, “Quinn.”

“Shut up!” Daliquinn screamed, words scraping out of his throat as he lunged unsteadily, “You don’t have the _right_ , don’t say my name like it means anything to you!”

“What did I do, Quinn? Tell me what I’ve done wrong.”

“Everything.” Daliquinn hissed, spitting, “You’ve done everything, anything you like, you’ve fucking ruined it all. Go away.” Daliquinn’s voice rose in volume and pitch, a piece of glass keening on metal, “Go away! If you come back I’ll fucking kill you!” There were tears on his face, furious ones that he refused to acknowledge. He flung the sword away and glared, still as a blade of grass trembling in a tempest. Silence stretched; Quinn’s mouth shaped the word ‘go,’ and Daimd went.

-

_You told me to stop._

Daliquinn and Daimd spoke without words, without need to clarify, without shame or question or doubt. A bed, a roadside, a hammock, a tree: all avenues for their yearning, all lustily spent in one another. It was rutting, fucking, loving, living, and it was all they needed.

-

_You told me I’m yours._

Voices rose beyond them, clearly growing nearer. Daimd could see nothing but Quinn’s shoulder, taste nothing but Quinn’s sweat, but Quinn could see them, and dug his fingernails into Daimd’s shoulderblades. In a firm voice, he ordered.

“Beast, show them.”

Daimd turned his head to yawn, full of teeth, and Daliquinn’s pleased grin could slit throats. The judgemental onlookers slinked away, speaking in their disdainful, floating tongue, and Quinn tangled his fingers in Daimd’s hair. Daimd’s hands, warm and definite, skimmed Quinn’s body as their words faded into a distant blur.

“Good creature. Wonderful.”

Daimd only growled in reply.

-

_You told me you’re yours._

“I’m going. I know you won’t be here if I come back.” Quinn refused to look at Daimd, lips pursed, “You’ll have found some life to live. You will. You must.”

“Quinn.”

“Shut up. Don’t stop me. Don’t follow me. What did that tribe of yours want to call me? Quinn-of-the-longest-walk? If that’s true—” And with mounting contempt, its direction unclear, “I have a long path to start.”

“You don’t believe them.” Daimd commented gently.

“No.” Quinn agreed, and turned his back. “I don’t.”


	4. vows

I promise to be there when you need me most—  
      shaking in silence, billowing fury, snarling pain  
—but most especially when you need me least, when you’re  
quiet and thoughtful, pleased and aloft, blood-stained and thrumming adrenaline:  
When you would be just as happy without my presence  
I will lend my spirit to you.

I will teach you to know my calm over your shoulder  
to recognise my footfalls echoing yours no matter  
how far you may go.


	5. ya'aburnee

You watch the sun set in the place where his shadow’s meant to be, and wonder what different choice you might have made to prevent the gaping lack. Twilight envelops you, and you wonder why the absence of lines shaping the darkness feels so great, why such a small change has foundered your sense of direction and left you stranded in an unfamiliar place you used to know. All the world is foreign to you now.

Beneath the cover of solitude, you whisper words you learned by rote and march solemnly through the motions he never watched, relearning and repeating the gift that ruined your life. The gift that brought you together, and the gift that failed you the moment you most needed it.

By morning, you’ve left footprints no one will follow, and moved on to trace a path no longer patterned.


	6. you sent this hurricane now it won’t go away

it’s not a wind I take lightly  
whispering from your fingertips like it won’t mean a thing  
but the breeze blows and I know  
the shape of all your storms.


	7. I knew you would come

In a dusty, sun-stained scrape of a village, he sits cross-legged and repeats patterns he invented to keep himself safe. He knows them better than he knows anything else, steeples and circles and weaves. He knows them better than sex and food and drink; better than his daughter, his friends, his family; better even than earth and air and water.

He is only patterns: patterns of waking, of waiting, of walking the same few steps day after day; patterns of offers accepted, of unsatisfying evenings, of dreamless nights. The calluses of old habits have smoothed to dry, supple fingers—now a circle, now a cross—and he waits, waits for hopeful days and empty nights—now a rise, now a parting—waits for the moment when his patterns won’t contain him any longer. Waits for the day when his patterns will prove their worth.

-

On a flat, dusty rock only a few feet away from the place where this pattern took precedent over all others, he sits cross-legged and recognises footsteps. His fingers dance faster, desperate and quickened by the life in his blood—a circle, a circle, a circle—he looks up and a smile cracks open his lips. I knew you would come. He whispers.

“I promised.” He says.


	8. light

I'll find you again, Quinn, I promise; I'll walk without rest.


	9. a terror

The first time you see him and know him, he’s rallying crowds from the base of a guillotine, screaming himself hoarse and drenched in blood from the knees down.

The second time, he’s holding the head of your musket to his throat and hissing a dare for you to pull the trigger; you do not.

The third—last—time is before he slips the bag over your head and pushes you down, snarling incomprehensible venom you nonetheless feel you have earned.


	10. but you need the laughter

“Hey.” She says, naked and propped up on one elbow, “Do you ever think about your past lives?”

Philosophy majors. You like her because she asks stupid questions. You like her because she asks questions you know the answers to.

-

Your laughter rumbles across baked red waste and his skirls alongside, a breeze taking part of an earthquake. Energy pulses from your fingers, thick and supple, and blood dances from the slash of his blades, and none of it makes sense, and none of it is real, and all of it is true.

-

“I promise I won’t laugh. What are you thinking?”

She always makes promises like that.

-

In dust under stars, you fuck him relentless and he grips you like a lifeline, nails scoring the broadness of your back in a language no one speaks and everyone knows. He does not murmur your name or cry out in pleasure, but arches his back and comes against your belly. His hair splashes the ground like a bloodstain, and his laughter is your heartbeat.

-

You roll her under you in a sudden fervor, and she giggles excitedly, ruffling your hair with trimmed fingernails. Hers is curly and coppery—it should be straight—but her cunt welcomes you, and you take her one last time. You speak of your past lives only in motions and movement, grunts and sweat, and when you tell her you’d rather not see her again, she’s hurt, huffy and flouncing. You’re motionless to explain that the past needs be the present, when it comes so close you can taste it.

You leave the city and go looking again, for him, for always.


	11. fancy meeting you here

I didn’t realise;  
What a pleasure to see you here  
I haven’t been around but an hour or a day—  
it’s hard to keep track  
when the sun sets all the time.


	12. where it has not rained for days

There are days when you’re a constant presence in the back of my mind  
You, who I have never met.  
I scrimp and scrape and smile, elbow deep in suds till late into the night  
you ever occupy my thoughts  
even or especially  
when I’m too tired to wonder  
Like a memory I can’t place, you,  
who I have never met.

I catch hints of your laughter floating through breezy curtains  
your touch raising the hairs on the back of my neck  
your sharpness and your bitterness and your—  
and my breath stops.

Who are you who I have never met?  
I have no better name for you  
A familiar stranger, a fearful comfort, an easy malaise.

I question my beliefs and see you named a curse;  
I wonder what I might have done to earn an ire so profound, and  
cannot find an answer.

Would it be a curse if I found you in the streets,  
you who I have never met,  
if I tasted your name on my tongue,  
drank in the smell of you,  
and became all you ever wanted?

What kind of person are you who I have never met  
that you stick in my bones like shrapnel?

Maybe, I decide,  
I am cursed not with the memory of you,  
but with the gaps between.


	13. I’ve come to set a twisted thing straight

It’s been a lifetime or two since I’ve seen you—how’ve you been?  
I see you bear no children this time, no screaming wife in tow  
In fact you look positively gaunt, my love.

I’ve been the world over, a hundred times or two.  
A barrage of bullets in Jerusalem, a hail of horror in India, an episode of epidemic in Kenya.  
The world’s shit, you know  
And yet none of these deaths stick with me so much as yours, my love.

It isn’t that you killed me, that once. Not then, anyway.  
You promised not to leave me and you broke it with blood on your lips.  
I persisted on bitterness alone, burned by your betrayal  
like a fire no one else could cast  
my love.

It’s been a lifetime or two now, a hundred times over.  
You start to remember and then you forget.  
I start to forgive and then  
you forget.

I’m born new every time, but your flame marks me over and over.  
Once, more, again, a few more times.  
my love.


	14. if I had met you on some journey, who would we be now?

We lie side by side in silence, both spent but neither sleeping, and somehow the situation seems too familiar. I don’t know your name, and you don’t know mine, but I know you; I knew the feel of your tongue, the heat of your touch, the sharpness of your teeth, the sound of your pleasure. You shift, and my instinct is to raise one arm so you can mold yourself alongside my chest, which you do with a twitch of your lip. I can’t tell if it’s a smirk you meant to hide, or a smile you couldn’t stifle. You say nothing, and I grunt in agreement.

The bed is rickety and creaks with any movement, not like the dusky, sun-baked earth that embraced us before. Our clothes cling haphazard to a chair in some distant corner of the room, a room with four solid walls and a locked door instead of gauzy curtains and whispered scandal. The noise beating through the floor is a firm, repetitive beat, like the rap of our skins beating against one another. I owe the dance floor another hour or two at least before the end of the night.

You’re rising before I find any words. As you pull on your jeans and button your shirt, I say the only thing I have to offer, “We’ve done this before.” It isn’t a question.

“It was nice to meet you.” You say simply, and for once you aren’t sarcastic. “Find me again.” You sound resigned, stubborn, lonely; you sound like your silhouette in a pool of light from the hallway, and you sound like the door closing firmly behind you.

I think, in the future, I’ll remember you as sensation: something I’ll want to name. But I don’t think I’ll see you again.


	15. obedience

I don’t mean to hurt you—  
I make promises I intend to keep  
   it isn’t a crime to fail  
      only a shame.

what else would you have me do?


	16. shown

if I die in every life except this one  
does that make this the only chance  
to get things right or the last chance to get things wrong  
I’m tired,  
I’ve seen,  
I’ve been,  
I’ve heard,  
I’ve said,  
I’ve tasted,  
I’ve drowned,  
I’ve burnt,  
I’ve bled,  
I’ve cried.

When I asked for the world, this  
isn’t what I wanted.


	17. they say

They say you should feel excitement, when you meet someone for the first time: your blood should rush, your mind leaping from question to question.

They say you should feel anxiety: your throat twisting around your tongue, your fingertips cool and taut.

They say you should feel heat, cold, weight, lightness: many things.

They say you should feel _some_ /thing, but I only met you first once.


	18. if I told you 1000 secrets, would you keep them?

if I made you 1000 promises  
and kept 999 of them  
would that make me a liar?

would that one failing  
characterise all the others into nothing more than flukes?

would you refuse to trust in the face of  
insurmountable evidence,  
then use the fraction of my failing  
as justified betrayal?

oh, I know you would.


	19. turn the crank

“Fucking stop this!” The scream runs away from his throat, sprinting high-pitched down a decrepit hallway with crumbling walls and rat bones lining the floor. He kicks the body—it’s rotted dry and shearing to dust—and then he throws himself on the floor, inhaling ashes and screaming, “Stop doing this to me! This isn’t what I fucking want!” Eyes glazed over with tears, he fumbles for the razor blade he stole from some idiot at the last hostel he slept in. There’s no one to listen, so he murmurs to himself. “This isn’t what I fucking want.” He bows his head and slices.

-

He wakes in Paris, trembling with exhaustion and hunching away from the glow of the gas lamps. There’s a direction in which he needs to travel, a place he’s going that feels like an ocean away, and if he’s going to make it then he needs every damn penny he can steal. He examines his knuckles, scabbed-over bony nuts winched tight around finger-bolts too thin and brittle for real work. He can’t remember what it feels like to not be hungry; food never tastes of anything.

He’d been a courier for a matter of hours, but they refused to pay street spectres and he bit them to show his appreciation. His pockets are no heavier or lighter for the exercise, but his belly feels emptier.

He crawls, groping blindly, until he dies meters from the water’s edge, his eyes forever fixed on a distant harbour.

-

He is healthy and luxuriating; this is Istanbul, and he is the son of a bath’s proprieter. His skin glows, his hair billows, and his bed is never empty, but whenever he wakes, he is filled with a profound lack, an idle disgust, and an irritable misery. He loses more and more hours of the day to the grounds, as he wanders barefoot between stumped, angular trees and crushes olives beneath his bare soles.

One day in the height of a lavish summer, his father finds him hanging from the tallest tree they have; in his pocket, a note says only, “I should have drowned. I’m much prettier when I drown.”

\- 

“Where are you?” He snarls, black-eyed and hollow in Tokyo. He stands in the centre of a crosswalk, people flooding past on either side, and turns in a slow circle, as though that will help—and there he is. Their eyes meet, and something in the world goes off-kilter. Furious, eyes full of burning, he whispers, desperately too far to be heard, “You promised me. You promised, and I didn’t fucking want this.”

He runs. He runs until his lungs ache as much as his head, until his vision blurs the neon lights into one long cylinder of colour, until he finds somewhere as dark as he wants the world to be, and he shuts his eyes gratefully against the shouts as the train approaches.


	20. & the end

He sleeps, and dreams of tomorrows he can’t understand.

-

In a grey world of flattened stone and blowing smoke, he wields a heavy hammer and batters out objects from slabs of metal. His shoulders ripple with strength and yet the items he fashions are small, precise, and delicate. To one side, a skinny man with acid eyes perches atop the unworked metal and shares the gossip of bigger cities—the goings on outside his forge and town. He scowls and sparks fly, and the young man threatens how he’ll be replaced by the great machines and factories that are swallowing up the world.

“Then,” the youth drawls, “You’ll have to come be a thief with me.”

The hammer strikes, and he growls that he is not made for such things, and then fingers are upon him and laughter rings in his ear, alongside a hiss that he is far too noisy for such stealth, and he always has been. There is a word he doesn’t recognise—a name, a title, a word for him—and fingernails bite into his skin, and the work he does is forgotten in a fit of lust.

-

This time, the earth sighs wet heat and he is married, with a great-breasted wife and a score of brown-skinned children. Work has long-since dissolved into a vague memory, and now his days are dedicated to little more than finding ways to dispense an endless income. He watches days sink away like pennies into fountains, aware of a profound dissatisfaction despite attentive children and a beautiful, passive wife. He sends his family to a cooler city for vacation, and takes himself to a dense, knotted town where he is no one.

In the mouth of a sharp-tongued foreigner he barely understands, he finds respite. It’s one rough, single night of bare skin and grazing teeth, and waking the next morning with an unkempt, empty bed beside him and a greater gap in his chest than he thought possible.

-

He knows the pattern by now, and the clamour of the blue sky above unsettles him. He is wrinkled and his bones ache, and he has yet to find Quinn. He has walked the world once-over; he has walked countless countries and heard hundreds of words, but never the one he knows best. Still he walks ever on, seeking only—always—the one seeking him.

-

It’s the end of the world and they stand parallel to one another, eyes alight on the roiling sea. The gulf stretching between their cliffs chafes with spray, but they reach across and fasten hands, without ever needing to look.


	21. nobody else will be there then

paralysed by indecision  
I thought I might understand  
you  
in the quiet place between knowing and unknown  
but you were  
thunderous


	22. all the world’s tomorrows (ii)

there is a garden in the stars

a hundred thousand lives from where the bones are buried

in a black hole; in empty space

the dust of memories stirs awake

and the silence is broken with laughter like shards of glass


	23. past tense

A little before daybreak  
rest the memories of the last dawn we watched together  
People will say you can’t hold the morning  
So  
I will wait for you there, love  
to prove them wrong.  
It should be easy, right?


	24. we are the dust that disappears into the cracks

I remember  
The sun, sighs, sand and silence  
Love, do you?  
I remember red, blue, green  
Laughing like nothing else mattered  
Love, do you remember?


	25. I haven't seen a lot of things as interesting as you

did you see a ghost  
while you were searching for a reason to

you turn, looking  
for the glint that caught the sun and shone  
but it’s dust  
lingering  
suspended between you and where you thought you needed to be

in your hand you hold  
the idea of a memory, round and cool  
full of star lights

it’s lonelier than you imagined  
out here


End file.
